I think Rachio is behind the ball on this, considering switching controllers. When will Rachio develop this technology? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8rfpF5kVaM should partner with GeoDrops…
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wink wink
While I used to think something like this was a good idea, I don’t think I want a single location (or even multiple specific locations) to dictate how much water my lawn needs. I’ve seen graphical results from sensors for golf courses and such which cost many thousands of dollars to both install and monitor show the huge variation of one area to another, and know my lawn varies much more than that. I’ve also used a pretty good quality moisture meter on my lawn, confirming the discrepancy from one area to another. IMHO this will limit this kind of technology in determining irrigation.
In the referenced video, it also appears the user is watering every day (at least when there isn’t rain), which isn’t a great idea, and is a good example of what the water level at the sensor IS, rather than it being used to determine when and how much to water.
I prefer knowing how much water the lawn needs based on well-known and published variables and calculations, used by Rachio, to determine the amount of water needed. But that’s me.
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Not sure if you saw this related long-running thread (https://community.rachio.com/t/how-do-you-interact-with-soil-sensors/32650), but I think it’s safe to say that there’s interest from Rachio in terms of what Geodrops may bring to the table, especially as a fellow cloud-centric product.
The other interesting thing that I just discovered is there appears to be interest from Geodrops (at least their beta testers) as well! I’ll paste a screenshot below of the voting results from when Geodrops asked their testers about what integration they should focus on next: the top choice was Rachio, which the GeoDrops PM acknowledged in the thread.
(this is from their Public Beta group at GeoDrops Beta Group - can’t seem to directly link it right now).
So, I’m going to guess that there will be integration (and hopefully partnership!) at some point “soon-ish” (keep in mind that GeoDrops still isn’t shipping production hardware yet).
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I think of this as two aspects - predictions of what should be happening (assuming proper inputs set by the user) and determining what actually did happen/current state. The ET predictions that Rachio leverages is, as you said, is based off of well-known and published formulas. That said, the real world loves to throw curveballs and sometimes predictions are inaccurate, thus the need (in my eyes) for hard data around what’s actually happening.
Being able to quantify the difference between the predictions and reality is where I see GeoDrops playing an important role for me, even though, like you, I anticipate a wide variety in results in different areas of my relatively small lawn. That’s ok though - I’m used to watering different zones differently already, so things won’t be much different.
Well, certainly some measure of precipitation is required. With GeoDrops it’s one or more measurements of your soil’s moisture. I use an Acurite weather station which measures rainfall and inputs that to Rachio. Lacking that, Rachio provides “typical” rainfall for the area based on measurements around you, but that certainly isn’t as accurate as measured rainfall.
Anyhow, rainfall, for me, is where the hard data comes in. And it’s constant across my yard, pretty much, so I have a lot of confidence in it.